The present invention relates to Bridge game scoring devices for computing and displaying the score in the game of Bridge and in Bridge-like games.
The card game Bridge using a conventional deck of (52) cards has been played in a number of versions. At present, the three most popular versions are Contract Bridge, Duplicate Bridge, and Chicago. For these three versions of bridge, play consists of a series of hands and each hand begins by an auction that consists of bids made by the players in rotation. The bid is won by the party bidding the highest for the hand. After the hand is played, trick points and premium points are awarded depending upon whether each party is vulnerable and depending on whether the party winning the bid was doubled or redoubled. In addition, in Contract Bridge, points are awarded to the party that first wins two games and in all bridge games such as Contract, Duplicate and Chicago, two scores are kept for each party, the partial score or game score and the total point score.
The complexities of bidding in any of the games of bridge are formidable and many books have been written advising bridge players on how to bid. Score keeping is complicated and some players will confess, after playing for many years, they still do not know how to keep score.
Heretofor, considerable effort has been made to provide appartus manipulated by the players in a game of bridge for displaying the bids so that each players bid is displayed to all the other players, the purpose being to eliminate verbal communication between the players during bidding. Efforts have been made to provide game scoring mechanisms that display each party's score. However, they are not automatic and do not automatically compute and display vulnerability, trick points and premium points; they display only what the operator sets them at and, hence, they are score keepers and displays rather than score computers and they do not relieve the players of the burden of calculating the scores at the end of each hand.